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The script and tricks in the ODF scripting section of this website show how to create office-ready texts, presentations and spreadsheets automatically, in the OpenDocument format, which is a worldwide standards. This is all many people need to work today. Sometimes, however, it’s still necessary to either print those documents, or exchange them to somebody in other formats, like PDF or those of the older releases of Microsoft Office (newer releases of this program are already partially compatible with OpenDocument through free plugins, so if your partners have those versions they should really use those plugins, instead of bothering you with requests for drug-like, legacy file formats, but that’s another story).

Many people write far more now that they are constantly online than in the pre-Internet age. Most of this activity is limited to Web or office-style publishing. People either write something that will only appear inside some Web browser or a traditional “document”, that is a single file, more or less nicely formatted for printing. Very often, however, they don’t do it in the most efficient way.

The most common solution for the first scenario still is to write HTML or Wiki-formatted content in a text editor or, through a browser, directly in the authoring interface of CMS systems like Drupal or Wordpress. The other approach is even closer to the typewriting era, since it’s limited to using a word processor like OpenOffice. Both methods involve too much manual work for my taste, especially if you often want to reuse or move content from one format to the other.

After my talk about ODF scripting at OOoCon 2010 I got,by another OOoCon speaker, Rony G. Flatscher another script for automatic generation of OpenDocument invoices, or any other ODF text with a fixed structure.

Slideshows are extremely popular as presentation and educational tools, but have a couple of serious problems. The first is readability: let’s admit it, many slideshows are almost unusable. One of the secrets to useful slideshows is terseness. Each slide should contain only a few short points or pictures which summarize the key concepts you want to transmit to the audience with that part of your talk.

The other big issue with slideshows is that GUI presentation software, be it PowerPoint, OpenOffice Impress, KPresenter or anything else, can be quite time-consuming and distracting, no matter how you use it. Writing bullets and sub bullets as simple text outlines is much faster, even when you’re just pasting together notes you scrabbled on your PDA, email fragments, quotes from Web pages or thoughts of the moment.

Sooner or later, many of us need to process some numeric data in plain text format, be they system logs or sales totals, and to generate reports and charts out of those data. Scripts and utilities like gnuplot could be very useful in such cases, except when the results needs to be a normal spreadsheets with charts and formulas, which is both editable and compatible with people who only know how to deal with spreadsheets in office suites.